The Digital Movement

Thanks to invitation from IDA, we had the chance to attend the event which was held at NTUC Centre Auditorium on the morning of 24th July. This is what happened!!

Event started slightly late at the NTUC Centre Level 7 Auditorium and opening address was by the CEO of IDA, RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, who just stepped into his new job early in January this year.

Next up was the GOH, Mike Liebhold from Institute for the Future, a Silicon-Valley based research think thank, who set the tone for the topic of the event, Digital Abundance. Basically, Mike introduced what IFTF is and after that gave the audience a brief rundown of the evolution of computer bandwidth. He said that as we move ahead into the 21st century, the evolution of computer processors that has been following Moore’s Law be soon having a breakthrough. Moore’s Law defined that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed in a chip doubles every 18 months, but Mike predicts that will change to become the doubling of the the number of cores on a chip every 18 months! Mike then came up with a graph that depicts the periods in the development of technology, from the period of computing development in the 80s, to the idea of communication in the 90s, to the generation of sensing in the 21st century, and finally in the future, sensemaking will be making the headlines. By sensemaking, Mike refers to the semantic web and the evolution of the recognition, mining and synthesis processes. Mike then introduced cloud computing, which is part of the future of computer servers. However, at this point in time, the reliability of the current grids available are not as reliable as it should be because of the lack of protocols. Cloud computing enhances parallel and concurrent programming which can help with the scalability of a platform hosted in it. Running out of time, Mike showed us several slides of what the future will look like, in terms of researches on technologies such as:

• Smartphones as the world computer. (a link up of mobility and grid computing)
• Development of wireless technologies. (WiMAX, LTE, 4G, Wireless HDMI etc..)
• Invisible Computing - creation of a digital layer
• Body area networks (sensing and making sense of signals on the body - healthcare)
• Face and speech recognition
• Sensing for Geopositioning (now - GPS or Wifi; 2015 - multi sensors)
• Development in terms of multidisplinary sciences (semantics of all the domains)
• Identity Centric Computing - next generation Human Computer Interaction
• Life blogging/recording (personal data mining)
• Applications in Behavioral Health
• Citizen Sensing (eg. checking on the environment)
• Social Reality
• Mobile Immersive Media
• Smart Reality (in terms of Communications)
• Video with Digital Displays

However with all these exciting and cutting edge technologies, there comes a downside to it, which can include abuses of these systems, security of the grids and the problem of backing up these networks.

Next up was Dr Tan Geok Leng, CTO of IDA, who gave us an insight into what Singapore is doing to improve and help push Singapore into the global map of digital abundance. He gave some examples of award winners in innovation and research areas. He talked about how the top-down and bottom-up approaches have to be used together to help in the R&D areas.

Before the break, we had the panel session on creating the enablers of digital abundance. The facilitator was Mike Liebhold himself, and the panel consisted of Derek Callow, Marketing Lead, South East Asia, Google, Daniel Ingitaraj, Driector of Developer & Platform Evangelism of Microsoft, Prof Kwong Dim-Lee, Executive Director of the Institute of Microelectronics at A*Star, Prof Lye Kin Mun, Deputy Executive Director of Research at Institute for Infocomm Research, A*Star and Prof Lawrence Wong, Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NUS. The panel talked about the importance about embracing and making use of change and how multidisplinary research is critical to bridging gaps, such as a job of a linguist and an engineering researcher. They then discussed about other issues such as relevancy in the period of digital abundance, how the user experiences can be improved because in this era, the user is key to everything, so understanding the users is important. Finally, they talked about the future of computing where it goes beyond the keyboard and mouse, and of mash computing.

After the break was the panel on Implications of Digital Abundance for Users, where Mike was again the facilitator. This panel consisted of Lucas Chow, Group CEO OF MediaCorp, Dr Sarah Muttitt, CIO of MOH, Aroon Tan, MD/Co-Founder of Interactive Digital Dreams Pte Ltd and Magma Studios, Tan Tong Hai, President & CEO of Singapore Computer Systems and Dr Ting Choon Meng, Chairman & CEO of HealthSTATS International Pte Ltd. This panel talked about issues related to their own personal fields, eg. Lucas talked about the need for media mashing in the future as this is a period where the consumers are multi-tasking and attention is divided among different mediums, so Mediacorp has to create a balanced situation where it captures maximal attention from the user. With regards to Healthcare, Sarah talked about changing the clinics to be more patient centric. Other issues also covered was the importance of intellectual property and how the people’s morals affect it, the need for education between the provider and users, how digital abundance actually encourages digital isolation, which affects human and physical interaction, and finaly with collaboration, balance is kept and is benefitted with elements of human interaction.

The events ends with a summary by Mike and Dr Tan, who then took some questions from the floor.